Jan. 14-20 is Idiom Week, and today we thought we’d have a heart-to-heart about some strange phrases we use. Idioms, metaphors and similes are all types of figurative language. According to ...

Being a linguist—and someone who has tried to learn several languages (including English) in addition to my mother tongue ...

Learning languages is challenging. There are thousands of strange new words to know, along with how to pronounce them and use them correctly in a sentence. One of the trickier parts is figuring out ...

Idioms—phrases that come to mean more than each word's "literal meaning" on their own—have been a part of spoken language for a long time. They may change as the years go by and often vary from ...

In the days before mass merchandising, poorly fastened axe heads would fly off while they were in use. The result was dangerous, hence why the phrase is used to describe risky behavior with ...